One of the challenges that I want to take on in the upcoming year would be to read through all my books. However, if I am brutally honest with myself, the likelihood of that happening is very unlikely. However, one step that I can take in order to get to this goal is buy less books. This is really hard for me, because I literally want to read everything.

I love buying books, I have always found comfort in going home with a stack of books. However, I realize that if I buy books I need to read at a faster speed and literally do nothing else but read in order to get through all my books.

So, what does that mean for my Goodreads goal? I have been pondering this for sometime. I have come to the decision that I will set my goal to 10 books and up it every ten books when I get there. This will just relieve the pressure of not reading enough and reading shorter books in order to achieve a goal. I would love to focus 2018 on reading books that I have been putting off due to size, or the mentality that I have to read a certain amount of books and end up reading nothing at all.

I know in the month of January I will be dedicating the entire month to reading “It” by Stephen King. And although, I don’t want to have a set “to be read” monthly list in 2018. I decided to dedicate January to “It”, because I don’t go back to school until the 29th. Also, I decided that I will be reading the e-book for this book because I tend to read e-books a little faster and it will definitely be easier to carry then the physical copy. (Just an observation- mass pocketbooks of “It” are impossible to track down.)

If you would like to join me on the adventure of reading “It”, leave a comment and I would love to discuss this book with you.

With Warm Cups of Tea and Just a Few More Chapters & A Very Happy Holidays!

As one of my New Years resolutions is to post at least one blog post a week, I decided why not start now?

So without further or due, I present to you my “Top 5 Books I want to Read in 2017”.

These are books I hope to get through this year. Although, there are only 5, I hope to read more than this. This year I decided to set my goodreads challenge to 1 book. Mainly, because I don’t want the pressure of having to read a certain amount of books. Secondly, I want to be able to read thick books without feeling like I am taking too long to read them, and lastly I want to find my love for reading again.

Coming in at Number 5: Tender is the Night by F.Scott Fitzgerald

Synopsis: Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, Tender
Is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick’s harrowing demise. A profound study of the romantic concept of character, Tender Is the Night is lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative. (Goodreads)

Number 4: Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari

Synopsis:

Now a New York Times Bestseller

A hilarious, thoughtful, and in-depth exploration of the pleasures and perils of modern romance from one of this generation’s sharpest comedic voices

At some point, every one of us embarks on a journey to find love. We meet people, date, get into and out of relationships, all with the hope of finding someone with whom we share a deep connection. This seems standard now, but it’s wildly different from what people did even just decades ago. Single people today have more romantic options than at any point in human history. With technology, our abilities to connect with and sort through these options are staggering. So why are so many people frustrated?

Some of our problems are unique to our time. “Why did this guy just text me an emoji of a pizza?” “Should I go out with this girl even though she listed Combos as one of her favorite snack foods? Combos?!” “My girlfriend just got a message from some dude named Nathan. Who’s Nathan? Did he just send her a photo of his penis? Should I check just to be sure?”

But the transformation of our romantic lives can’t be explained by technology alone. In a short period of time, the whole culture of finding love has changed dramatically. A few decades ago, people would find a decent person who lived in their neighborhood. Their families would meet and, after deciding neither party seemed like a murderer, they would get married and soon have a kid, all by the time they were twenty-four. Today, people marry later than ever and spend years of their lives on a quest to find the perfect person, a soul mate.

For years, Aziz Ansari has been aiming his comic insight at modern romance, but for Modern Romance, the book, he decided he needed to take things to another level. He teamed up with NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg and designed a massive research project, including hundreds of interviews and focus groups conducted everywhere from Tokyo to Buenos Aires to Wichita. They analyzed behavioral data and surveys and created their own online research forum on Reddit, which drew thousands of messages. They enlisted the world’s leading social scientists, including Andrew Cherlin, Eli Finkel, Helen Fisher, Sheena Iyengar, Barry Schwartz, Sherry Turkle, and Robb Willer. The result is unlike any social science or humor book we’ve seen before.
In Modern Romance, Ansari combines his irreverent humor with cutting-edge social science to give us an unforgettable tour of our new romantic world. (Goodreads)

Number 3: Eating Animals by Jonathon Safron Foer

Synopsis: Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between carnivore and vegetarian. As he became a husband and a father, he kept returning to two questions: Why do we eat animals? And would we eat them if we knew how they got on our dinner plates?Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, and his own undercover detective work, Eating Animals explores the many fictions we use to justify our eating habits-from folklore to pop culture to family traditions and national myth-and how such tales justify a brutal ignorance. Marked by Foer’s profound moral ferocity and unvarying generosity, as well as the vibrant style and creativity that made his previous books, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, huge bestsellers, Eating Animals is a celebration and a reckoning, a story about the stories we’ve told–and the stories we now need to tell.(Goodreads)

Number 2: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Synopsis: A blind old man, a young apprentice working in a tattoo shop, and a mad woman haunting an Ohio institute narrate this story of a family that encounters an endlessly shifting series of hallways in their new home, eventually coming face to face with the awful darkness lying at its heart.(Goodreads)

Number 1: Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin

Synopsis:
Time is out of joint. The summer of peace and plenty, ten years long, is drawing to a close, and the harsh, chill winter approaches like an angry beast. Two great leaders—Lord Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon—who held sway over an age of enforced peace are dead…victims of royal treachery. Now, from the ancient citadel of Dragonstone to the forbidding shores of Winterfell, chaos reigns, as pretenders to the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms prepare to stake their claims through tempest, turmoil, and war.

As a prophecy of doom cuts across the sky—a comet the color of blood and flame—six factions struggle for control of a divided land. Eddard’s son Robb has declared himself King in the North. In the south, Joffrey, the heir apparent, rules in name only, victim of the scheming courtiers who teem over King’s Landing. Robert’s two brothers each seek their own dominion, while a disfavored house turns once more to conquest. And a continent away, an exiled queen, the Mother of Dragons, risks everything to lead her precious brood across a hard hot desert to win back the crown that is rightfully hers.

A Clash of Kings transports us into a magnificent, forgotten land of revelry and revenge, wizardry and wartime. It is a tale in which maidens cavort with madmen, brother plots against brother, and the dead rise to walk in the night. Here a princess masquerades as an orphan boy; a knight of the mind prepares a poison for a treacherous sorceress; and wild men descend from the Mountains of the Moon to ravage the countryside.

Against a backdrop of incest and fratricide, alchemy and murder, the price of glory may be measured in blood. And the spoils of victory may just go to the men and women possessed of the coldest steel…and the coldest hearts. For when rulers clash, all of the land feels the tremors.

Audacious, inventive, brilliantly imagined, A Clash of Kings is a novel of dazzling beauty and boundless enchantment;a tale of pure excitement you will never forget. (Goodreads)